Still Staying in Style

THERE ARE TWO main reasons that the fashion label Abraham & Thakore has been able to reinvent itself almost entirely over the past two years. First, that since its launch in 1992, the designers— David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore, who graduated from NID, Ahmedabad, and NIFT-educated Kevin Nigli, who joined them soon after—have kept their offerings squarely in the ready-to-wear space for over 30 years, even though they designed and sold artisanal pieces for premium rates at the same time. A good example would be the ikat-houndstooth sari from their Autumn-Winter 2011-12 collection, which was snapped up by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) as part of its permanent archives. The second is their just-over-two-years-old partnership with Reliance Brands Limited (RBL), which seems to have fired up the engines with new product lines like bed linen, scented candles, tableware, handwoven art, and even furniture now available and showcased at their flagship store in Delhi’s Defence Colony, which opened recently.

A&T, as they’re known more familiarly within the fashion industry, have opened five new stores in the past one year alone, with another slated to open in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills in the second half of this year. This is a marked difference from their beginnings, when it took them over 15 years, and the economic downturn of 2008, to finally participate in fashion week in 2010 (where they received a standing ovation; I was there) in a bid to capture the local market as global orders dried up for Asian designers across categories. Before that, a chunk of their business came from European and American retailers.

October 2022 marked their first fashion show in Mumbai, in partnership with RBL. And the lineup seemed both super fresh and mindlessly, beautifully obvious. It was A&T that we all wanted to wear, and now, could afford as well. There were easy-to-wear, nightsuit-like digitally printed separates for everyone, as well as oversized leaf-patterned handwoven silk ikats from Odisha in the form of saris and jackets. There were embroidered shirts, as well as slinky tunics with shimmering sequins that wouldn’t be out of place at a nighttime hotspot away from prying parents’ eyes. And even a co-ord set digitally printed with a texture of raw, slubby khadi. Clever.

To those habituated to the usually limited lifespans of designer garments, A&T’s remain as good as new after every machine wash. (Yes, machine wash.) Their daring focus on prints and digital patterns, inspired by their long association with the art of textile design, has changed their game, whether we realise it or wait to. Available at relatively afforda­ble four-figure prices in the form of wearable separates, their design vocabulary is reaching an economically wider and more age-diverse segment of the population, giving the designers’ work a platform no fashion week or event can match up to. By itself, this is unique; usually, it’s the all-important fashion show that is any designer’s best moment in the spotlight.

In terms of design output, A&T’s lineup seems by far the most comprehensive and lifestyle oriented amongst all the Indian RTW (ready-to-wear) brands at Reliance Brands Limited. But how did this quiet, respected, reticent textile-based fashion label become such a strong proposition in a market where no other RTW brand has shown that kind of commercial fillip?

To answer this, we must look at RBL, founded in 2007, which has, over the years, invested in big names like Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla, ak ok (a ready-to-wear label by Kolkata-based designer Anamika Khanna, launched in 2019), Manish Malhotra, Raghavendra Rathore, Ritu Kumar, Satya Paul, and Rahul Mishra. And none of these are really known for their ready-to-wear.

RBL’s involvement with A&T’s operations began in March 2022. Since then, they’ve expanded fast. “A little too fast,” laughs Rakesh Thakore, “but in a good, thought-out way.” What’s slightly surprising is that it was the designers who approached Darshan Mehta, president and CEO of RBL, to explore the possibilities of alignment at the end of 2019. “We looked at how the company was handling the luxury brands that came to them via Genesis Luxury, like Ermenegildo Zegna and Bottega Veneta,” adds Abraham, alluding to RBL’s periodic investments in that company since 2018.

What’s interesting here is that they considered RBL’s track record with Italian luxury brands as the standard, while theirs has always been a RTW label. “I wouldn’t focus too much on the word ‘luxury’,” interjects Abraham, “but consider how brands like Zegna and Bottega have always been slightly difficult to understand”—an unfortunate side-effect of being ‘quiet’ and craft-focused in today’s world; of being “brands that don’t have flashy logos emblazoned across their designs,” in Thakore’s words.

Then came 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic dampened their conversation with RBL for just over a year. But it didn’t take long for it to begin anew. In March 2022, with their partnership announced, work began in earnest. This included a complete overhaul of their design studio in Noida, new hires to fill both A&T’s internal as well as bridge positions liaising with the new investors, and the announcement of their first fashion show as a Reliance brand at the fashion week in Mumbai, in October 2022.

In 2020, their close friend, designer Rajesh Pratap Singh, had taken over the house of Satya Paul (SP) (founded in 1985). SP was India’s first design label to disrupt the sari space. “Going back to when Satya Paul began, in the 1980s the sari was considered somewhat sacrosanct,” says Abraham. It was the time of textile doyennes like Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar, and the sari had to be protected and nurtured in all its traditional, artisanal forms. “Then came Mr. Paul, questioning the status quo and breaking it down.” And 35 years later, with Rajesh Pratap Singh in the designer’s chair, SP had come back into the visible spectrum of Indian fashion labels, especially with its shows regularly featured on the fashion week calendar once the event made a comeback post-Covid. After four years, and with his last show for SP in April, Rajesh handed over the reins to Abraham, Thakore, and Nigli, the new creative directors of Satya Paul. “There was a certain overlap between us as Rajesh wound up his operations here, and that was very useful,” says Thakore.

In the two months since the announcement, Abraham says they’ve had the chance to delve deep into the SP archives with Rajesh Pratap Singh, and found that the way Satya Paul thought and worked matches their own ethos. “Reimagining the sari the way he did,” says Abraham, “…it’s what we do. Even if it’s in our own, quiet way. I think that this attitude is the real point of similarity, not just visual cues like heavy embroideries or wild, colourful prints.”

SO, WHAT KINDS of garments do they plan to design for Satya Paul? How many saris in the lineup? Printed separates? What about the brand’s emblematic ties and pocket squares for men? Abraham, Thakore, and Nigli do not plan to commit to any seismic shifts immediately. “In our experience, design takes its time to evolve,” says Abraham. “And we have the brand’s existing customers to care for, too,” adds Nigli. “Satya Paul is colour, pattern…it’s very noticeable. And even Rajesh worked with this signature in his own way. We’re going to find our take.” Abraham adds that “there is a brand language that speaks to SP’s customers, and we can’t ignore that. You can bring your own voice to the idiom, but you still have to respect it and speak it.”

The fact that they knew Satya Paul (who died in 2021) decades before his design responsibilities came to them also helps. Because right now, they’re focused on getting the first collection out and into Satya Paul’s 13 stores across five cities nationwide. After that, it’ll take a minimum of six months for the analysis of the retail data and other market metrics to get back to them, totalling up to a full year, conservatively, before they get any real analysis of how effective their efforts have been. And that conservatism, perhaps, serves a reason.

In a marketplace where the need for constant assurance on retail predictions forces designers to make increasingly quicker and (hopefully) predictive design and production decisions, Abraham, Thakore, and Nigli have had years of experience managing those expectations—first within, and then in the markets. What’s the worst any critic can hit them with? That they take too much time? In today’s world, that’s possibly the greatest flex any brand or designer can claim. Besides, labels like A&T and Satya Paul can and should spend more time making fewer designs, focusing on quality and wearability over brute numbers in a carousel of quick collec­tions that spend only a few weeks in stores and even fewer in clients’ wardrobes.

The real question is, will what worked for A&T also translate well for a brand like Satya Paul? For the designers, this query can be answered through the product mix that developed at Satya Paul over the past few years—especially with the more recent design interventions of Rajesh Pratap Singh, who gave the label a hefty lineup of separates aimed at a younger crowd, designed and priced for that section. Abraham, Thakore, and Nigli it seems, plan to continue that push, perhaps realising that label SP’s former push into embellished haute couture dresses and heavy, bridal lehengas was a dream best left in the past, where it belongs. “But even though Satya Paul is known mostly for its prints, we will still indulge in some embellished styles,” adds Abraham.

The creative fit aside, there are other considerations to installing designers into creative roles at labels that have set their standards over decades. This is fairly new in India, where corporate investment in fashion brands is still a developing industry tactic, and inheriting design roles is still novel. Right now, there are only a few brands that aren’t owned and/or still run by their founders. Apart from Satya Paul where ‘external’ creative directors have been a norm for over a decade, only Wendell Rodricks comes to mind. Even before the founder’s passing in 2020, the label’s design responsibilities had rested with Schulen Fernandes, his protégé, for about four years. But she exited the company unceremoniously barely a year after his passing and the acquisition of the label by Purple Style Labs. Apart from these two names, no others of note jump out. India’s fashion labels, on the whole, are securely in the hands that nurtured them from their very beginnings.

With saris, ready-to-wear, accessories, home furnishings (a new category, which always seemed like a no-brainer given Satya Paul’s mastery over colour and pattern) on Abraham, Thakore, and Nigli’s list, one is not expecting any big shockers. But experiencing the expectation of a new design direction for an old fashion house is new to India. For that alone, it’s worth the wait.

David Abrahamfashionglobal businessKevin NigliRakesh Thakore